The incumbent, Joe Biden, has seen better days. On the plus side Biden is an honest, moral, and ethical individual who believes strongly that his policies, both foreign and domestic, are what’s best for this country and the world. His support for Israel is iron clad to the point of losing the Arab American vote in the next election.
But then there is what New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said about him. First as noted in The Hill:
Klein stated that while he appreciated Biden’s achievements while in office, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, he also noted that the president has been trailing in the polls — and invoked the recent stir over his age, after a damning special counsel report branded him “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“To say this is a media invention, that people are worried about Biden’s age because the media keeps telling them to be worried about Biden’s age?” Klein said.
“If you’ve really convinced yourself of that, in your heart of hearts, I almost don’t know what to tell you,” he added. “In poll after poll, 70 percent to 80 percent of voters are worried about his age. This is not a thing people need the media to see.”
A recent poll, conducted in the wake of the report found that 86 percent of Americans think he is too old for office.
The Huffington Post added the following:
“…here’s the thing,” Klein argued. “I can now point you to moments when he is faltering in his campaign for the presidency because his age is slowing him. This distinction between the job of the presidency and the job of running for the presidency keeps getting muddied, including by Biden himself.”
The episode’s release comes a week after a special counsel report on Biden’s handling of classified documents cleared him of any wrongdoing but made damning comments on his mental acuity, citing his struggles to remember key moments of his presidency and vice presidency. An outraged Biden held a surprise press conference that evening, asking “how in the hell dare” the special counsel claim he’d forgotten the year his son died.
But while addressing claims about his mental fitness and memory, Biden flubbed a reference to Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, calling him the president of Mexico. Biden has made similar mix-ups before, Klein noted, and that’s clearly weighing on voters.
“None of these matter much on their own. The human mind just does this,” he said. “But it does it more as you get older. And they do matter collectively.
“Voters believe Biden is too old for the job he seeks. He needs to persuade them otherwise, and he is failing at that task — arguably the central task of his re-election campaign.”
None of this is very appealing to even Democratic voters who support all of his polices.
With respect to his support for Israel. That too is troubling. The renewed vigor in support of a Palestinians state at the end of the conflict is a deal breaker for me. I do not see myself voting for a president who believes that Israel’s best interests are in creating a Palestinian state led by people that consider Israel illegitimate - and whose population supports Hamas barbaric attack against the Jewish people on October 7th towards a goal of ‘liberating’ all of Palestine from the Jews.
Then there is former President Trump. On the plus side (without getting into details - and despite liberal rhetoric to the contrary) there has never been a president more pro Israel or more right about Iran. Until the pandemic, his domestic polices helped create one of the most prosperous economies in my lifetime. And his choices to fill vacancies on the judiciary – especially the Supreme Court has helped restore some of the values the founding fathers intended this country to be all about.
But Trump’s reaction to Biden’s victory in the 2020 election has proven to me that he is unfit to be president, regardless of how great his conservative policies may have been for the country. And even Israel. The fact that he has been indicted on numerous charges ranging from defrauding the government (which he was just convicted of to the tune of a $355 million judgment and was barred from doing business in New York for 3 years), to inciting an insurrection.
He is also a man that tried to intimidate Republican election officials in Georgia to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn the election results in his favor.
Even if the motivation behind all these indictments was political (and they probably were) they are nonetheless based solidly on the law. And if he is convicted of the last one (which has the RICO statute attached) we have the prospect of a convicted felon becoming the President of the US.
The man is a charlatan, a liar, and a con artist of the highest order whose policies - if reelected - will be dominated by revenge against his opponents (in both parties!) I could go on. This list of negatives is hardly exhaustive.
Trump’s MAGA Republican supporters don’t care about any of this. They are joined at the hip with their hero. They will support him no matter what. They see all of those indictments as the election interference Trump has called them. They firmly believe he will win in November and restore their hero to his past ‘glorious’ presidency.
They may be right. But as of now the polls do not indicate a clear victory for either Biden or Trump. But I don’t see non MAGA Republican conservatives that consider his policies to be more important than his character voting for him this time. The majority of the American electorate will not be voting for a convicted felon. Although the MAGA Republicans will be voting for him anyway, they are not the majority of the electorate. Not even close.
The only candidate that would easily beat Biden at the polls is Nikky Haley. Whose policies would be far more likely to be in line with their conservative values than are Joe Biden’s. And with respect to the Jewish vote, No one… Not even Trump in his first term is more pro Israel than Haley.
As far as I am concerned, neither candidate is worthy of my vote. We live in a topsy turvy world where the best candidate for the job, and best chance of winning the general against Biden - has the least chance of winning the nomination of her party.
If only the MAGA Republicans would realize this fact they could have the kind of leadership they want by switching their allegiance to Haley. But that ain’t gonna happen. Instead their blind support for Trump could very well mean 4 more years of Biden.